Rejuvenation: In the Darkest Hour

[Music] hi everybody eve harrow on rejuvenation for the land of israel network it is the waning hours here in israel of april 18th 2021 just beginning the seventh day of shivan beautiful actually quite hot days here in israel and enjoying the sunshine masks came off today so lipstick went back on and you can see everybody's smile and and everybody's running the dentist now to get their teeth cleaned because they haven't in a year and all this really fun stuff when your face isn't covered anymore but there's really a sense here in israel like oh my god they're like we're semi back to normal hopefully it should please god just last um but i'm really really excited and honored to have with me today judy battalion who uh wrote a book that i couldn't put down and that's saying something because i i read a lot um the light of days the untold story of women resistance fighters in hitler's ghettos and before you think to yourself like another holocaust book like how many can there be it's been so many years all the stories have come out let me tell you that this is a story that has not come out and uh judy is on the new york times bestsellers list with this book and that tells you something as well so judy thank you so much for joining me here today on the land of visual network thank you so much for having me i'm excited to be here so tell us a little bit about like how do you find a new story about the holocaust new research it just seems like there's been so much done and of course the survivors are passing away every single day we're losing more and more of the of the witnesses and the people who actually experience this horror so tell us about the book the idea for the book how you went about researching it some of the challenges involved all right big questions yes we do big questions on rejuvenation um so you ask how i find a new story about the holocaust and i found that completely by accident um i was and actually found this story years ago um i was living in london at the time and um i was exploring my jewish identity i was writing about it i i'm the granddaughter of holocaust survival and i was but i was very interested in the idea of the what i call the emotional legacy of the holocaust how trauma passes through generations in my own life i was thinking a lot about danger and how i felt that my holocaust heritage was sort of shaping how i perceived and reacted to danger and i wanted to explore this i was doing a lot of performance at the time so i decided to write a performance piece about jewish women who had confronted danger and the first woman to come to my mind was someone i had studied in fifth grade her name was hannah spanish right and for those who don't know who she is hannah senich was a hungarian jew she was young about 20 years old and she moved to what was then palestine before world war ii but during the war she decided to join the allied forces to become a paratrooper and to go back and to go back to nazi occupied europe and fight and you know i studied her as a child i kind of grew up with her as a hero figure right legend um but i guess i was interested at that time last time as a legend more in her as a person like who does that who goes who volunteers to go back and fight the nazis so all to say i went to the british library because i was looking for like a more nuanced biography on connoissenisch surely someone had written something exploring her psychology she's the only woman i'd ever heard of like this she was also a poet she wrote beautiful songs which every israeli child knows eilee lee and really beautiful songs so right so there's that there's definitely that sensitive side to her you know that artistic side right so i wanted to understand who is this person who is a beautiful lyricist and going back and and dropping from airplanes fighting nazis so i went looking for a good biography of her um but there were not very many books about her in the british library i have to say so i just ordered whatever they had and when i went to pick up my stack of books i noticed one of the books was a bit unusual like as an artifact it was an old book it was in a fabric cover with gold lettering and um it was in yiddish it was called foyen into ghettos women in the ghettos um but i always say even more unusual than the book is the fact that i speak yiddish so i start flipping through this book looking for hana senis but i i can't find her she's only in the last few pages in front of her it's like 150 170 pages of other young jewish women who fought the nazis from the polish ghettos that's why it's called women in the ghettos but it was photographs and snippets of bios and stories which with titles like ammunition weapons um partisan combat and just in tone and in content it was so different from any holocaust narrative that i that i knew or that i'd grown up with um even in my family and community that was largely holocaust survivors so right away i knew there was something here that intrigued me and and that i felt he had had mirrored and and that's how it all began wow let me ask you something because many of my friends also were you know second generation holocaust survivors some of them grew up in homes where nobody talked about anything it was like the parents would scream in the middle of the night and the kids knew they were having the nightmare others and it seems more if it was the grandparents hurt a lot like it seems that there was some opening up of the next generation the grand you know the people didn't want to talk to their kids traumatized their kids so much but with their grandchildren it was a different kind of relationship and i could do that is that what happened in your home did you did you hear the stories in my own home yes that was more similar to my life um and in my book i i had a lot of the survivors and their grandchildren and i i followed how this story works over generations and yes my generation the 3g the third generation does have a less uh fraught relationship with the survivor and also a sense of pride about our grandparents history and we also ask about it we learn it in school we you know so there is a different dynamic so i did hear bits of my grandmother's story um it was never like um a chronological narrative from a to z it was always you know a little bit here a little bit there a bit there but yeah she talked about it all the time my grandma mm-hmm she's not a lot she's not living anymore no she doesn't know about this book but it seems like she was kind of the inspiration or some kind of spirit behind it that that got into you yes okay so you look at this book and here you are with i mean i have a master's degree in psychology so i'm fascinated also by trauma and living here in israel of course and a lot of the discussion here in the last week especially with holocaust memorial day and then with israel's memorial day for wars and for terrorism it's been a lot of discussion about trauma and how it carries on and how it carries on into the next generation so where did you go with that particular idea because that was the impetus for this book i mean initially that was your idea right right so that idea i mean people are asking me all these questions about honda senate i'm like i don't know i didn't end up researching on a sentence right because sometimes it went in a different direction um but so when i started working on this book i which took me a long time by the way and went through many iterations and it was going to be many different projects before it became this book behind um but i i at first i was at first i was really trying to figure out the story but but your question is good because the last section of my book either the book's in four parts and the last part is entirely after the war um because it's i was i continued to be so interested for these women who were resistance fighters and who did survive what did happen to them how did their trauma impact the rest of their lives how did they go on surviving experience both of tremendous loss and also of being in an underground and armed underground an organized underground did that influence their experience of the war so i i i met with many families and i did ask these questions and and yes what i loved about the book is you got as personal as you could with the information that you had like even a physical description of each women and you go really into a lot of women many of whom spoiler alert don't survive the war it's not like you sat down and just based the book on a lot of the survivors um and of course that becomes that drew me into the book like is she gonna is she gonna make it because i became so invested in some of the people that i'm reading about and these are real women and that's and then that one doesn't make it or it's like you know i can't tell how many times i cried during the book because i can't believe it here she did these incredible things and she smuggled in and she dressed up you know a lot of these women of course didn't look jewish right so they were able to fake it and go on and but the the extraordinary bravery that you describe you know the the i mean that's i don't know if all my listeners know what kritzbeh is it it translates his unmitigated goal but it doesn't mean that in this context it's like it's like overwhelming bravery to get on a train like full of nazis dressed to the teeth looking beautiful the last person they would suspect and do whatever it was they had to do i mean how did you find out all this information because some of it is like really incredibly detailed um to to an insane degree really i mean kudos to you for the for the hard work you put in here it's so obvious on every page thank you i did an insane amount of research um i work primarily from memoirs and personal testimonies i myself i'm a historian but i've also written a memoir so i think both those aspects of my own experience really really played out how i developed this book because i it's all true it's all historically researched i spent you know years in archives and libraries but i really worked with testimony i really tried to stay very close to these women's voices what we would call a close third person i tried to foreground their writing their words their sometimes their spoken testimonies i really tried to bring that alive on the page and i also did a lot of research around really the visuals of the time and the fashion of the time trying to really understand you know i spent time in poland a lot of my time there was just getting on a train and seeing what it looked like i i wanted to take the same train rides these women took and try to understand what they saw to be in their bodies and in their positions as much as possible i mean and some of them are 15 16 17 years old alone in the world it's like it's really mind-boggling to think about this these aren't like 30 year old women with some kind of maturity they're they go from childhood into hell overnight in certain cases i write about organized youth resistance and these women uh are anywhere from age 16 to maybe 25 26 those are the leaders those are older women so these are young women who are risking their lives um in order to do this underground resistance work yeah i can tell you more about it yeah was there do you think there was some kind of defining personality trait in a lot of these women um or or some of them came from like revenge against the nazis like they just watched the whole family be slaughtered and even if it killed them which in some cases it did they were not going to go down without a fight or others of them from um a place of faith like were you know how many different i don't know if there's one defining trait or if there were a few that that you pulled out specifically so again i speak about many women in the book so i can't i can't generalize everywhere exactly there are a few things that i think shaped them and their responses to danger so for one many of them who i write about had been part of youth movements before the war most polish jewelry um the 100 000 polish jewish youths were part of youth movements they actually weren't allowed to join the polish scouts so this was kind of a jewish response to that but but these movements were not just the scouts they were intellectual emotional social and spiritual training grounds for young jews in poland and i write about women coming out of socialist secular movements some were zionists some were not um but in these movements they really were trained to you know they were trained in physicality they they were self-sufficiency they had farms they wanted to they did defense classes physicality sports athletics they were trained in psychology they were emotional awareness um they have to understand their strengths their weaknesses they were trained in a diet of jewish pride they learned a lot about jewish history they discussed their own uh legacy they learned female revolutionaries like rosa luxembourg was on the curriculum they were readers um and they also were they were socialists they believed in equality in collectivism and collaboration many of these women had left their family homes as teenagers to move into kibbutzim or communes with with their youth movement which were set up all over poland i had no idea about that before doing research for this project so many of these women first of all and they were and the most important thing they were leaders in these movements even before the war women had many some of the movements each group had a man and a woman leader um many of the women they were they were um they were educate women in poland were educated they had to go up to school up to eighth grade university was open to women many of these women had university degrees or specialist degrees so these women were leaders they were educated they had already worked together and lived together and understood their own they they had a strong dynamic these were close-knit groups and they felt very proud of being jewish and very proud of their heritage and i think it's their pride their understanding of collaboration and collective work their val their values they valued truth and justice and these were political and philosophical groups so they grew up already um valuing this the fight for freedom and so the these i think women were really they were brought up in a context that also enabled this transition to becoming an underground in the war it's absolutely fascinating and you know many of them have the opportunity to get out they were booked on the next boat to palestine or whatever it is and they stayed they made the choice to stay some of them left and came back they smuggled themselves back like connoisseurs but you know i found out much more they went back to nazi-occupied poland they became leaders in the warsaw ghetto they had been out already right but they felt such a sense of duty and responsibility for the jewish community and what comes through in your book is the bonds that they have between them as well where you talk about that collective responsibility um very much shows you know that it wasn't just about saving themselves i mean many of them sacrificed themselves in order to save the group or try and save the group or whatever needed to be done in the ghettos or in other places i mean these are just the the stories are really really outstanding um you know years ago i read a book i think it i it's called dove on a wire it was translated from hebrew and it was a man who survived the war and he was talking about the trauma of the war and how it changed his personality but in his case and he was it was a very raw and very difficult book to read because he talked about how violent many of the survivors were after the war like many of them that you know went on rampages themselves because their great degree in the camps they they've lost their humanity because they had been turned into animals and it took a while and it was a big struggle to get that back do you see that with the did the women react like that you're talking about women in danger and how they react to danger and how they react to trauma um is there i mean i would imagine there's a difference here in the gender that women wouldn't necessarily go into violence afterwards but they would internalize it or behave that differently is that was that something that you saw here or among those who did survive that you spoke to of course on how they dealt with the years of unspeakable horror that they lived through so that's a good question most of that first of all just to make a distinction most of the women i write about were not in the camps um they were doing underground work um on the outside they were in hiding they were pretending they were passing they were in the ghettos out of the ghettos right a couple of them had been in the camps though um or in other horrific political prisons um so you know i'm working from personal testimony these women were had already died by the time i started really writing this book so i i wasn't interviewing them i wasn't you know probing their psychological lives i i was working from testimonies and memoirs that they had left and then conversations with their families so in general i mean so i can't you know i can't tell you what was really happening i didn't always know that but in general no i did not hear about violent behavior it's not something that came up um but i certainly there was extreme depression um one woman couldn't survive i have said she couldn't survive surviving and even though she survived she still killed herself the difficult was i mean the trauma was so entrenched it's so difficult um and i found that with many of the women that i wrote about they for many of them there was a coping mechanism of of really not talking about it they were you know when the war was over they were in their young 20s mid-20s or the oldest and they had they had nothing they had no family they had no home they had no nationality they had missed the time in their lives to train for a career when one usually trains they miss the time in our lives when they often get married or fall in love or have kind of normal normal what we would consider normal romantic development or or social intimacy development this is all for them so skewed and intensified or skipped over and for many of them they i mean they all found themselves in new countries alone i mean with some of their comrades from the war but but that's it and they had to start over they really had to start over and again they had their whole lives ahead of them so what i found more was a repression a real repression as you said i mean some of their children didn't even know these stories at all um it some of them wrote their memoirs or wrote testimonies in like 44 45 and then forgot about it that was part of their therapy almost i got it on the page and i i i had to move on um others didn't speak about it at all until later in life often by grandchildren as we were right right and i would imagine that many of them were raped or had to do whatever it was that they had to do to survive um which we know about and are not going to talk about that uh for many reasons for many reasons for many many reasons and we really know now with a lot of that's come out and and some of the openness now and sharing uh abuse and especially of women how utterly traumatized they must have been you talk about not having like boyfriends and the typical teenage and young woman experiences they had the opposite you know they had i write a bit about the sexual violence and the threat but again i i'm only writing from what they have offered so often they are not writing about that in their memoirs right right for understandable reasons of course completely understandable and you've got to make your way through did you connect to a particular character they you character a particular person that you were writing about was there like without giving too much away but uh or that you can it's fine um it's not like a mystery um was there like someone that you found yourself thinking you know like what if that had been me you know sometimes we'll read well like i mean i know i've done that what if i was in the holocaust like how would i have reacted what would i have done would i have gone with my children to the if they took my children away and sent them to the gas chamber and i had a chance to live but what i've gone with my kids because even if it meant dying because i wouldn't want to live without them like i mean these are horrible choices that people were making every second of every day was there any any point where you like found yourself kind of drawn into a particular person in the situation that she was in like maybe as a surprise to you also because it seems like a lot of what's happening to here is surprising like it you know it's you're looking for one thing and something else comes upon you and you go with that which is nice i i i mean this question of what would i have done i mean i think that was all i thought about every day for 10 years working on this you know every situation every what would could i have done this would i have done this what how would i what you know so i mean that's a question i ask myself constantly i you know is there someone i i relate it's usually the things that i relate to are less their heroic actions and more when i read about their personalities their social uh you know one woman the leader fromitska who was 25 when the war started she she was already a leader in the youth movement she left poland and but couldn't take it weeks later she smuggled herself back in became a leader in the warsaw ghetto ran soup kitchens and programs traveled the country under nazi rule going to ghettos giving lectures and seminars and bringing information and booklets she'd printed illegally she was the first person to smuggle weapons into the warsaw ghetto she put them in a potato sack two guns under potatoes she was stationed in this town of fijin she ran an underground i mean she she was called di mame because the mother in yiddish she was such a leader of the people um so that part of her i i don't relate to i could never be never be that i mean i i mean i would be i mean admire it's an understatement she's incredible she makes me cry every time i i talk about her how how did we not know about her for all really really but but what i relate to is when i read all these memories friends had written about her when they talked about how you know she was very introverted she had trouble keeping up friendships because she was very in her own head she i was like oh i'm like that i'm like that i'm like that so the things that i related to were more people's interests one woman very into poetry obsessed with poetry or you know that those are what i the traits and and the attributes that i felt were very compelling because these were people like me and you you know and that's what i wanted to bring out that these weren't that they're not old-timey characters these were young women who were very much like me when i was a young woman in in many ways and i and they wanted them to feel relatable and and real because they are they were look i think what you have done you know there's an expression in hebrew i which is when you do something for somebody and you know you're not going to get thanked like it's it's it's hard to describe what chris said means it's like loving kindness but it's really more than that you've done something that there's no way that you're going to get paid back for and that's exactly what you did judy you brought these women to like no you did you brought women that most of us had never heard of we've all heard from us right all of us but virtually every other person in your book i had never heard their name before i had no idea that this entire underground existed that what these women were doing for years and they saved so many lives and they they also gave a spirit to the jews that were fighting back against the nazis and something you know you could say well they lost right the warsaw ghetto and the other ghettos were eventually destroyed but there was something bigger than them that that they brought in there and you have you you you dug them out of the history bin and you brought them to life and i think that's why you're on it's on the bestseller list because nobody else has done that in the last 70 years and you gave them a voice even though it's you know most of them never had children and don't have anything to continue and that's what you've done for them is a real jose chalenet is giving them a place in history and in our hearts and in our minds that is priceless and uh it's a tremendous thing that you've done really i want to thank you like i closed the book feeling that i knew a much more of the history of what had happened there but i knew these women you know and and that they were going and that they're going to affect me also for the like i'm not i'm far from being a hero not even close but maybe there i can dig sometimes some at some point inside myself just a little bit harder to accomplish something that i didn't think i could because if they could then we have to also and that i think is huge is really really huge and you were able you were able to do that and do it in beautiful english and written so well you could see that it's part history part memoir like you're you infused it with life you really did um one last question then i'll let you go you're a mom did writing this book affect you it affect you in terms of like you know you're being a mother writing about so many women who went through so much um first of all thank you very much for what you were saying before it's very kind of you and touching and i really felt a duty to these women i always say i feel like fromka's granddaughter that she never had right because who if i can't tell her story who else is wrong no one else does documents to tell itself right um i feel very responsible to her so thank you for reading and caring um being a mother made this research very difficult i mean you know i'm reading about horrible things that happen to children in the holocaust and what and as you said before the choices mothers had to make about what to do with their children right many some of the women i write about were helped rescue young children and cared for them both during and after the war they a lot of them were were very dedicated to to and to children whose parents have been alive and they help them find sauce but these are i mean i mean horrible stories um again part of why it took me so long to write this book right i have to i have to stop start too i can see i could see why but i think that you've really added um i don't know if there's a genre of holocaust writings and a genre seems like such a right word like historical fiction and murder mystery but i guess i guess there's a place on the bookshelf but um i think you've really done a magnificent job and uh really i recommend to to my readers to pick it up the light of days by judy battalion where is it available it is available wherever you can buy books um and you can find on my website www.judybatalion.com um many of the sales links and sites also i should say there's a young reader's edition i i didn't finish before this is for ages 10 to 14 and this is the one thing as a mom that i feel i that i can give my daughters and son um this story and and you know hope that they too you know appreciate this that's amazing that you did that so if people want to be in touch with you i assume i don't know these days with cove people aren't really doing book signings and going out to places and doing book readings i assume you're zooming and and available online can people book you for that and and ask you their own questions based on their own community synagogue church you know whatever it is parenting group um whatever it is that they need because you have we do we just touched on a few points you have such a broad range of thoughts on this and different areas of expertise can they do that yes i am doing a zoom world tour um so all the information is on my website um you can get in touch with me on the contact form right there's also a long list of my zoom events and um i'm trying to keep it up to date but yes you can reach me there fantastic okay good uh anything else judy before we sign off any anything like that just thank you for for your thoughtful conversation i i really appreciate it well that's the whole point of this podcast is to something that interests me i'm going to assume hopefully will interest at least some of my listeners who are magnificent and very interested and love things jewish in israel and i know that this is definitely a topic that draws people back over and over and over again so thank you so much judy battalion the light of days the untold story of women resistance fighters in hitler's ghettos um definitely an important addition uh to the knowledge that we have about um those horrific years in the 30s and 40s in europe okay thank you everybody uh letting judy go now uh eve harrow thanks to tabitha and to ben as usual for everything they do to put out this podcast and i hope you're all well and if not getting better and that the world is moving into uh brighter days uh eve hera rejuvenation on the land of israel network broadcasting from israel take care everyone goodbye for now [Music] you